It really is like night and day. I've learned so much about the NES and how it works by just toying around and experimenting with NESmaker then the three years of tudying the NESDEV reading the many technobabble filled 'tutorials' by people who know the hardware far too well to layout the information in a comprehensible 'walkthrough' way for those not used to working directly with the hardware. Understanding how polling the inputs worked was the wost. I knew what to do with the data once it was read but it jut wasn't clicking otherwise. Same with writes to the PPU. NESmaker flung those doors right open in a hands on manner where I could poke around and see what happens or what breaks. Thanks to NESmaker I now not only have an understanding of coding for the NES but everything else fell into play also. Like how the mapper hardware in the carts work and how they interface with the CPU and PPU. I'd still be struggling to wrap my head around it let alone have my game running on NES hardware variants like the Playchoice 10 or Vs. System. This alone has made NESmaker more then worth it and the time you graciously dedicate to it.

While Joe and the team has been toiling away tirelessly on the next version of NESmaker, I too was slaving away in my nerd den over a hot burning hex editor poking around and studying sheets of technobabble all weekend, but it was far worth it as I managed to give Mermay's Den on the Playchoice 10 a custom menu and instructions screen. I was nearly at the end of giving up though when I made a major breakthrough as the little I know about the 6502, I knew even less about the Z80.

Oh wow, good job Mihoshi!
Do you have a Playchoice 10 arcade machine (to test on real hardware)?

Sadly no, so I won't ever know how it behaves on the real hardware until I can make arrangements with someone who does and burn the roms or get a board myself to test on the real deal. That is a goal eventually though as emulation only gets you so far and a local arcade has one but there'[s no telling how thay'd take to me poking around in their machine. LOL.

I really like those new level layouts! I think the octopus is my favorite.

Many thanks. They were fairly fun to design and see just how far I could push the simple tile set. I'd always planned for a octopus or squid like boss inspired by the one from Mario RPG and speaking of which, the sunken ship is my favorite part inspired by the one in Mario RPG and the ghost ship from super mario world. If I had more time I'd have had you write up a level theme for it inspired by DKC2's Klomp's Romp and hot-head bop for another level but thus is the way of deadlines. LOL.